QuotaFactory’s Co-Founder and CEO, Peter Gracey, participated in a webinar hosted by InsideView called “Building Innovative Applications” joined by Aldo Zanoni of Riva. Below we put together some highlights and key takeaways from the webinar in order to share relevant industry findings and spark more conversation in the sales and marketing technology community.

Kick-off Poll Question: I'm interested in learning how to...

What is happening in the industry that has caused you to shift your product strategy and/or product roadmap?

Key Points from Peter Gracey

The competitive marketplace for sales and marketing technology is getting very crowded, very fast. What we acknowledged was a gap in providers enabling the human aspect of data-driven decision making. So we used our 14 years of sales development expertise to devise our own sales technology and we called it, “the humanization of prospecting.”

Key Points from Aldo Zanoni

For many CRM users, a vast world of data is just sitting there. The number one question becomes, how do we humanize and drive value from that data to enable better relationships with our customers? Customers now expect B2B organizations to develop a 1:1 relationship with them. They expect you to know everything about them. There’s a whole world of data out there, but how do you put it in a format that is easy and simple to use? Instead of creating a web application, Riva chose to integrate directly where people live. And people live in email. Creating a new way to synchronize data became the mission.

Why is the stand-alone CRM just not cutting it anymore?

As an industry, we have transitioned from providing the basic tools (telephone, email, etc) that sales professionals need to succeed, to helping them to create impact in their companies. So, why is it that more than half of today’s sales reps still aren’t reaching quota?

It’s really not an issue with the sales professional, it usually resides in the sales process or lack thereof. The sales technology that is going to be the most successful moving forward, is technology that enables and encourages a proven process. Too often, we train our salespeople to sell and then we inundate them with clerical tasks that consume too much of their time that could be spent selling and closing new business. Salespeople need tools and technologies that have a process or workflow built-in in order to get them on the ground running (or selling) as soon as possible.

It is estimated by many analysts that CRM will become a $36 billion business by 2017, with success rates of only 30-50% in user adoption and satisfaction. Essentially, sales organizations are taking on a million dollar project that will end up costing them more than just dollars. With that kind of failed user adoption and dissatisfaction, it’s time to start taking a look at what can be changed and improved.